by Ruth Rendell
‘So Tesco are going to pay you for taking the day off, are they?’
‘I’ll take the day off pay or no pay,’ said Robin, the unpleasant look he gave his grandfather making Wexford laugh.
He saw them out, on their way to Kingsmarkham’s only club, and remembered suggestions he had heard of matchmaking. It was highly probable that Robin and Clarissa had never thought of marriage in connection with themselves, that if they thought of it at all, it was as something for ‘old’ people, those in their thirties, for instance. Any money that might come to Clarissa as a result of Friday’s disclosure, she would very likely think of as useful for buying a flat after she had graduated from university while her counterpart of fifty years before might have contemplated sharing it with the funds of a husband-to-be.
He put them and the ways of youth behind him and set his mind on Duncan Crisp, what they wanted him for and what they had done with him. If things were the way he believed they were, the madonna-tattoo man and the one with him would want Crisp dead. Alive he was always a threat and that threat increased as the time of his trial approached. They would want him dead for their revenge and their protection.
He had seen that tattoo somewhere. But where and when? Since October certainly and that meant that when he had seen it the weather had been cold. Only foolhardy teenagers needing to prove how cool they were went about in vests or T-shirts when there was snow on the ground, and this man was no adolescent. So where had he seen him? Sleep on it, he thought, and he went to join Dora who was riveted to a television programme about childbirth. Men are parents as much as women but few men want to watch babies being born on film while the woman who doesn’t is an exception. Wexford fell asleep after two minutes of it.
‘You talked in your sleep,’ Dora said when he woke. ‘D’you want to know what you said?’
‘Tell me.’ Maybe it was the name or even the address of the madonna-tattoo man.
‘You said, “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live.”’
‘Did I really?
‘Spare me the funeral service next time I’m watching TV.’
In the morning he remembered something about the man and the tattoo but not enough. For some unknown reason he connected it with Mrs Mukamba, the young and pretty Congolese woman who lived in a poor and run-down area of Stowerton. A house in Oval Road it was. If necessary he would knock or ring at all the doors in the street. It wasn’t necessary. He knew the house as soon as he saw it from the bags of rubbish and the two broken-down bikes in what had once been a front garden. Nardelie was her name, as pretty as she was. Nardelie Mukamba, the pious young woman who had attended Sarah Hussain’s memorial service. What decree or rule (or chance rather) had set Victoria Steyner in charming and elegant Kensington and Nardelie Mukamba here in this tip? Still, it was probably an improvement on backstreet Kinshasa. The bell being missing, he clattered the letter box. She came to the door, as lovely as ever in a thick woolly cardigan over her floral dress, with a fat baby on her hip and holding a toddler by the hand.
‘Good morning,’ she said, all smiles. ‘We have met. How are you?’
Wexford said he was very well, he hoped she was and what beautiful children she had.
‘A handful,’ she said and laughed. ‘A lovely handful. Please come in.’
It must be the wrong house, he thought as he followed her into a living room cluttered with toys. That man has no place here. It was very clean and the room was warmed by a single mobile electric radiator. The only warm room in the house in February, he guessed. She began to talk about the new vicar. She liked him, he had told her to bring her children to church if she liked and if they ran about a bit and made a noise – well, they were children, weren’t they? What did the people expect? But she liked to bring them up right. They must keep quiet and be good when she told them.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Wexford said. ‘I don’t even know if this is the right house but one day a couple of months ago I called here – I think – it was very cold. A man came up to the door and opened it with a key. His arms must have been bare because I saw a tattoo of a woman, a saint with a halo maybe, on his right wrist. I really do need to know who he is but I don’t suppose you can help me.’
She was laughing by now. ‘He lived upstairs. Not a good man, but a lovely voice he had, and my boys loved what they called “the lady”. You did, Jacques, didn’t you?’ The little boy nodded enthusiastically. ‘What was it? Do you remember?’
Jacques said promptly, ‘St Catherine, the man said.’
‘That’s right.’ Nardelie showed no dislike or disapproval. ‘Good boy. He’d been a bouncer in a nightclub, he told me. I was glad when he left, went to somewhere in Kingsmarkham. There was always people coming here, up and down the stairs. After drugs, I think, and I didn’t like that around my boys.’
‘Do you remember his name?’
‘Marty,’ said Jacques. ‘He said, you call me Marty.’
‘Martin Dennison, he was called, but everyone called him Marty.’
So he had been a dealer. Or had he? Wexford, walking back to his car, thought that he would not have jumped to that conclusion just from a number of visitors to the upper floor, though he might have done if he had had small children. A parking ticket on his windscreen caught his eye almost before the car itself did. What had he done or left undone? Stowerton still used old-fashioned parking meters and he had duly put in two exorbitant pound coins. But it hadn’t been enough. It was the first time ever that he had received a parking ticket and remembering a lifetime of being protected from such persecution made him laugh. Well, he would pay the fine, of course he would.
At any rate he wasn’t going to risk another by somehow parking in the wrong place outside the police station. He drove home and decided to walk to the high street.
‘A call came for you, Reg,’ Dora told him. ‘A Mr Steyner. Why use the landline?’
‘God knows. I didn’t know he had the number.’
Maybe he got it from his mother. Dora had written down the number Steyner left and Wexford called it but from his mobile.
‘Very good of you to call back.’ The voice was upper class. The kind of voice Marty Dennison had? More a superior banker’s voice, Wexford thought, though he didn’t know if banking was Steyner’s occupation. He also detected in it an undercurrent of nervousness. It was very slight but it was there, trepidation rather than rank fear. ‘I wonder if I may ask you a great favour?’
Wexford’s reaction to this sort of thing was always an abrupt or stiff reply. This time it was a cold ‘Of course’.
‘I believe you and I are due to meet Miss Hussain, Clarissa Hussain, on Friday.’
He knew very well they were. Wexford said nothing.
‘It seems rather awkward meeting like that, all strangers to each other, as I don’t imagine you know Miss Hussain very well.’
‘That isn’t so,’ Wexford said. ‘Clarissa rents a room in my daughter’s house. I’ve known her for nearly four months. She chose me to be present at this meeting.’
This Steyner ignored. ‘So I thought it might be a good idea for you and me to meet first. I mean prior to the three of us meeting. I could come to you in Kingsmarkham and we could have a talk about what I have to tell her.’
Why? Wexford didn’t say it aloud. ‘I think the whole thing, whatever it is, can wait till Friday. I hope I’m not being discourteous but I don’t see the need for a prior meeting. If you will go ahead with booking a private room we’ll all meet at the Olive and Dove at 11 a.m. on Friday. I will call for Clarissa and bring her with me.’
Steyner’s tone changed. He suddenly sounded weak and much younger than he was. The words he chose were strange.’I hope it will be all right,’ he said.
Making no attempt to decipher this, Wexford called Burden and asked to see him. ‘I’m having lunch sent in,’ Burden said. ‘Shall I double the order? It’s just sandwiches from the Italian place but nice o
nes.’
Poor Mike. No newspaper spy could catch him in his office and find fault in print with his daring to eat or drink while Duncan Crisp was still missing. The sandwiches had just arrived when he got there.
‘Smoked salmon,’ said Wexford. ‘For once they haven’t mixed it up with mozzarella or put it in focaccia.’ He stopped, met Burden’s eyes. ‘Am I becoming an old curmudgeon?’
‘Yes.’
‘I will strive to be tolerant and easy-going. Now, I’ve found the tattoo man. His name is Marty or Martin Dennison and he may once have been a bouncer in a nightclub. I think he lives somewhere in Ladysmith Road but I don’t know where.’
‘Well done,’ said Burden. ‘Have another sandwich.’
Wexford told him about the house in Oval Road and Dennison’s visitors while he lived there, his move to Kingsmarkham. ‘He’s a dealer, I think, among his other charming habits. I went to the house to see a woman called Nardelie Mukamba. I hope she’ll be OK. I don’t want him finding out she helped me.’
‘You think he’s dangerous?’
‘Well, don’t you?’
‘Where is he? And come to that where’s his mate and poor old Crisp? What do they want Crisp for, Reg?’
Wexford said slowly, ‘Crisp knows something. He’s in possession of a vital piece of information. I’ve spoken of it before but when I do you don’t want to hear. You don’t believe in it, you think it was Crisp’s invention, a ploy to get him off the hook. But Marty Dennison believes it and the man with him does and, more to the point, absolutely to the point, whoever is employing them does.’
‘Someone is employing those two?’
‘Of course. They’re just your run-of-the-mill villains, aren’t they? They’re thugs. An ex-nightclub bouncer and his pal. This won’t be new to them, they’ll have been involved in something like it before. I think Crisp is dead.’
Wexford stayed for a while, repeating his story until Burden admitted to a grudging belief in it. While he was there news came in that a green van had turned up, half sunk in a horse pond on a farm near Forby. A man’s tracksuit was in the back and immersion in half-frozen water hadn’t removed all the bloodstains on it. Soaking wet, it had previously been soaked in blood. The van was stolen. It had been reported missing a week before.
‘You may have been right all along. It looks like it. We’ve got samples of Crisp’s DNA to check against that on the tracksuit. That poor old guy.’
‘Your sympathy comes a bit late in the day,’ said Wexford nastily.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE SEARCH FOR Crisp continued. The weather changed, warming up, rain starting. The rain fell heavily, raising the water level of ponds, swelling the rivers. Meadows were waterlogged, some turning into shallow lakes. The Kingsbrook became a torrent, carrying with it the body of an old man, not naked but dressed only in underpants and a vest, and depositing it on the riverbank under Kingsmarkham High Street bridge.
Of course it was Crisp. There was never much doubt of that and none after the body had been identified by his landlord and a prison officer. His throat had been cut, the deed probably done in the Van, which would account for the excessive amount of blood on the tracksuit.
‘It shouldn’t be hard to find this Martin Dennison,’ said Burden. He scorned to use a nickname or diminutive employed by such a thug. ‘We’ve got a house-to-house going on in Ladysmith Road now. No, it shouldn’t be hard to find him.’
But it was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ROBIN HAD CHANGED his shift at Tesco, in order to have Friday free, and had worked Thursday night. It was he who opened Sylvia’s front door to Wexford. She had left for work an hour before. Clarissa came downstairs, not exactly dressed up but wearing a skirt (very short and black) and a sweater (very long and black) under a faux fur coat.
‘It was Mum’s. D’you think it’s all right?’
‘You look lovely,’ said Robin. ‘It’s more than all right, it’s perfect.’
He’d have said that, Wexford thought, if she’d come down in a burka or bikini. He said nothing. Ever since he woke up that morning he had been troubled by misgivings and wished that he had never taken on this task but had refused at the start. Too late now, much too late. Steyner’s fault, of course, setting up for a melodrama when all of this could surely have been done on paper.
‘We’ll have to walk,’ he said, ‘or call a taxi. The Olive won’t let me into into their car park as I’m not a resident.’
‘Let’s walk,’ said Clarissa.
Robin and she held hands. They invariably did. No one speculated any longer on what might be the purpose of this meeting. They walked in silence until Robin spotted a friend on the other side of the street, raised his hand and called out, ‘Hey.’
The friend said, ‘Hey,’ and after he was out of earshot Clarissa asked who it was. ‘Guy I was at school with,’ said Robin. ‘Jonathan something.’
The high street was busy as it always was on a Friday morning. They went into the Olive and Dove and Wexford asked at reception for Christian Steyner. He was told that Mr Steyner had a private room on the ground floor, down a passage where the cloakrooms were and the Internet room. Wexford told Robin to stay in the reception area which was also a kind of lounge with sofas, a couple of coffee tables and a newspaper rack, and passing into the passage, noted the name on the foot of the doors on the new lifts: Luxelevators Ltd.
‘I’ll be right here,’ Robin said to Clarissa, taking both her hands. ‘I won’t move. ‘If you want me, whatever it is, and I mean whatever, call me on my phone. You’ll do that, won’t you, sweetheart?’
Wexford restrained himself, said nothing but thought a good deal. If Robin had been going to the wars and Clarissa left at home with a couple of babies, the two of them on a railway platform in 1914, the parting could hardly have been more fraught. He shook his head, said, ‘Come along, Clarissa,’ and headed for the passage and the private room, the girl reluctantly trailing behind him.
The room was as such rooms always are, beige, with beige carpet, floor-length beige curtains, a bowl of glass fruit on a coffee table, a vase of artificial lilies on the windowsill. There was a brown tweed sofa and three beige-and-brown-patterned armchairs. The door was ajar. Steyner looked as if he had been pacing up and down, though he was standing still when they came in. Wexford expected him to shake hands, it would be the normal thing to do, and it occurred to him that whereas Steyner would have had no objection to shaking hands with him, he wanted to avoid doing so with Clarissa. He said, ‘Do sit down,’ and then, ‘It’s good of you to come.’
If the three of them had never met before, they had all seen each other before. On that occasion, Sarah Hussain’s memorial service, Steyner had looked a normal healthy man if rather pale, his hair prematurely white. Today he looked unwell, rather as if he was recovering from flu. Perhaps he was. Many people were. Once Wexford and Clarissa were seated he too sat down but immediately got up again and walked across the room to stand in front of the girl.
‘When I asked if you would name someone to be with you here I really meant a woman. I think it would have been more suitable.’
Clarissa said, but very gently, ‘Why didn’t you say so then?’
‘I don’t know. All this has been a great strain for me.’
Neither of them knew what he meant. ‘I didn’t want a woman,’ Clarissa said. ‘I haven’t got any relations. Mr Wexford is the nearest I’ve got. He’s my fiancé’s grandfather.’
Wexford started at the word but managed not to show his surprise. Were those two really engaged? Surely not. Steyner made no comment on what she had said but returned to where he had been sitting. He was looking at Clarissa, his pale blue eyes meeting her deep blue eyes. ‘You don’t know me. I had better tell you something about myself. I am fifty years old and a doctor of medicine but I have never practised. I sit on the board of one of our major medical charities. Your mother’s husband was my twin brother. We were identical twins.
‘I am homosexual but my brother was not. So much for identical twins having everything as well as their appearance in common.’
He paused. Wexford noticed that he hadn’t referred to himself as gay but used the formal correct word. He wondered what all this was leading up to. Not what he had imagined, certainly. Clarissa had begun to look frightened. She looked as if she knew that something alarming, even deeply disturbing, was about to be said, and Steyner’s tone was certainly ominous. He went on. ‘Obviously I have never married. I live in a civil partnership. Your mother and I met soon after Leo, my brother, first met her. They were very happy together. Perhaps to say “happy” is inadequate. They adored each other.’ He paused again. ‘I need a drink.’ Both Wexford and Clarissa thought he meant alcohol but he helped himself from a carafe of water that stood on one of the coffee tables.
‘I don’t know why Leo went to a football match. He had never shown the least interest in football. It must have been his first time. I don’t even know which teams were playing. I think one was Manchester United. My father was a supporter and I suppose Leo went with him because Dad asked him to. It was his birthday, my father’s, I mean, and Leo didn’t like to say no. There was a pile-up on the motorway and a lorry crashed into them. Both were killed instantly.’
Clarissa, who had been silent up to then, said, ‘Oh, awful. Poor Mum.’
‘Yes. Your poor mother. Poor all of us. I’m making too much of a speech of this. I must get to the point. After that, your mother went on seeing my mother for a few years. She and I met once or twice. Leo had no money to leave. Sarah – your mother – was earning but my mother worried about her and wanted to make her some sort of allowance but she wouldn’t take it. You’ve met my mother, I think,’ he said to Wexford. ‘She’s in the early stages of dementia and she’s very different from what she was then.’
Wexford nodded, said nothing. Christian Steyner went on. ‘Then one day I had a letter from Sarah. She wanted a meeting. We met after not having seen each other for two years. She was very direct, she always was. She said she would never remarry. More than that, she would never have a relationship. She supposed I would never marry or have a relationship with a woman and there she was right. I remember she looked hard at me, harder than anyone had ever looked at me, and she said that though I and Leo – she called him “my beloved husband” – were not alike in character, I was practically a carbon copy of him or he was of me.’ He began to speak very rapidly. ‘Therefore, would I be a sperm donor so that she could have a child that would be as near as possible Leo’s. Eventually, not that day but later, I said I would. I did.’